leftover mania

So I made this mushroom ravioli and salad the night after the salmon and green beans, and I wanted to use up some random stuff we had hanging around. The sauce was really easy, just the leftover canned chopped tomatoes, half an onion, a few cloves of chopped garlic, parsley, and oregano. We had an extra random chicken breast in the freezer, so I chopped that up into bite size pieces and (over) cooked it in the sauce. I realized we wouldn't be able to eat the whole bag of spinach as a salad, so I put some of it into the sauce as well. The pasta component of this meal was trader joes mushroom ravioli, which were really tasty, but we both agreed would have been better in a creamy sauce. Pasta in our world is not complete without garlic bread, so I used a french baguette, covered with a couple table spoons of the mix of melted butter, olive oil, fresh garlic, and garlic powder. And parmesan cheese and parsley, of course. I burned the first batch (oops) so this garlic bread was try number 2.




Next up was the salad, which was also really easy. Bagged spinach plus the strawberries I had for snacking plus pistachios I bought to attempt to make pistachio cupcakes for NP's birthday plus goat cheese which we use in a lot of salads. I liked the balsamic/dijon vinaigrette I made to go along with it, but NP thinks champagne vinaigrette would have been better. Next time I'll use Gorgonzola cheese instead of goat cheese though. Or maybe next time NP can do the cooking...

Kerry goes to Greece

As a homage to NP's heritage, I tried to re-create my favorite dish from an awesome lunch takeout place, the greek deli. They only serve the super delicious baked salmon platter on friday, which isn't really helpful when I have a craving for it on a Tuesday night. Right, so, the cooking. I made three dishes - salmon with yogurt and dill, green beans with tomatos, and orzo. I looked at a few recipes online but couldn't really find anything I was looking for, so I decided to just wing it.

First, the salmon. I put the fillet in a baking dish and seasoned it with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Then I put a few sprigs of fresh dill on top, and covered the whole thing with plain greek yogurt and more salt/pepper and about a table spoon of fresh lemon juice. I baked it at 350 for about 25 minutes. The idea was for the yogurt to melt and turn into a kind of creamy sauce, like at the GD, but that didn't happen. I had never had greek yogurt before, and it turns out that the tangy flavor wasn't really what I was going for, but it was still pretty good. In the future, I'd use less yogurt since the flavor was a little overwhelming.

The green beans turned out great. I sliced up an onion and sweated it in a pot until it was translucent, and then added three chopped up garlic cloves. After a few minutes, I added fresh green beans and about a cup of chicken stock. I brought it to a boil and covered it for a minute or two, then added about a cup of canned diced tomatoes then turned it heat down and let it simmer till most of the liquid had evaporated. I added a little fresh parsley and that's it! Mmm.

The orzo is pretty obvious, but I used half chicken stock and half water so it was more flavorful. The final product was a success, and NP did the dishes.